patrick.net

Don't forget 1981 with 17% in money market funds. So Mortgages might have been what 19-20? I recall getting back 18.4% in a Charles Schwab money market account. 100% liquid!

cvoc13 - Precisely. I was being very conservative as to where interest rates would go.
At 14% your $600,000 house would now cost you over $7,100 per month for the mortgage payment alone. To get it back to that same $3,200 per month, the purchase price would have to be down around $275,000.

Just for the fun of it, let's use a 17% interest rate. The same $600,000 would have a mortgage payment of over $8550 per month. Most people don't gross that much per month.
At 17% to get the payment back to $3200 per month, you'd need to pay under $230,000 for the same house...

Well, I definitely agree with you about the government using inflation to bail itself out of all the trillions of debt it owes to China.

That's why in 1-2 years, I will hedge against this coming inflation by getting a $729k loan (the maximum for a conforming jumbo mortgage) to buy a home in La Canada or South Pasadena. In 1-2 years, interest rates will still be at historically low rates because the economy isn't going to recover by then. So I will buy a home for my family in an area with top-rated public schools that I plan to live in forever (the savings from not having to pay for private school for my two children will be enough to justify the purchase in these great public school district neighborhoods).

This $729k that I'll borrow will be worth 50% in real inflation adjusted dollars 15 years down the road. So, I'll be paying back only $365k in real dollar terms. You see, it works both ways...inflation will bail out all of us who borrowed at historically low rates and later have to deal with home prices going down when interest rates go up!

Interest rates will only go up when there is inflation. The only thing that can go wrong for me is if I need to move due to employment reasons, in which case I'll be underwater when interest rates rise and home prices decline. I'll only have two options: rent out my home with low interest loan, or strategically default.

LA Renter - "Home prices would be nearly cut in half across the board to remain affordable without wage inflation"
I think that's exactly what I said in the post I wrote here, that if interest rates were at 10% you'd need to pay $370,000 for the same house you'd pay $600,000 for right now to get the same $3200 payment.
How will they buy at 9%? Either with all cash or for a whole lot less than the current home prices.

Least we not forget the other costs that are going to make our housing part of our monthly budget MUCH MUCH less, say 10% of our income instead of the normal 30% it is SAID TO be MAXED at now, I know I know same old post, Heath care, Fuel, FOOD, OIL, (not from our economy) but do some math in China and Brazil, expected food need increase, cars expected to be on newly made roads, etc... and you start to see that we are left having to PAY A WHOLE LOT MORE THEN we have been spoiled by, Can you imagine say 300 BL of oil? or a 15 dollar serving of meat? Health care costing 100 a day 3100 for your insurance, See (not that is not tomarow, BUT it is likey going in that direction, and granted they may never get that far in our lifetime, but to make a point you can see that the household budget is going to be RE WORKED and housing is NOT going to be ABLE to be 30% as we can learn to live with less, and less, but we need to eat, and fuel well fuel is the Bitch isn't it, We need to switch to others sources, but in the transition it is going to hurt

CaliforniaGray says

LA Renter - “Home prices would be nearly cut in half across the board to remain affordable without wage inflation”

I think that’s exactly what I said in the post I wrote here, that if interest rates were at 10% you’d need to pay $370,000 for the same house you’d pay $600,000 for right now to get the same $3200 payment.

How will they buy at 9%? Either with all cash or for a whole lot less than the current home prices.

Uncle Ben just said today that Fed will step in if economy heads further south. IMO he will never let interest rate go that far. We have to play around in 1 to 1.5% +/- from current rate for quite some time.

It seems like based on your last 3 paragraphs, now is a good time to buy because inflation is coming. I agree that in a vacuum, higher interest rates likely would mean lower prices, but in reality, interest rates aren't going to go up with Bernanke in charge if it is going to hurt housing. Just today he said the Fed will do more if the economy is faltering. That means mortgage rates going down to 3% are more likely than them going to 10% any time soon. It's probably better to worry about reality than hypos that are far off into the future. Are you still not going to buy when rates are 3%? Others will which will cause prices to go up again.

robertoaribas says

long term, the FED has very little control over longer dated interest rates. ALL they can control is short term rates. The very mechanisms the FED would try to use to control long term rates, such as buying copious amounts of longer dated Treasuries would lead to a currency crisis.
So, while you are correct that short term, the FED can step in and keep rates on mortgages down, longer term they cannot at all.

Well they have controlled that rate since 2007.

mthom says

It seems like based on your last 3 paragraphs, now is a good time to buy because inflation is coming. I agree that in a vacuum, higher interest rates likely would mean lower prices, but in reality, interest rates aren’t going to go up with Bernanke in charge if it is going to hurt housing. Just today he said the Fed will do more if the economy is faltering. That means mortgage rates going down to 3% are more likely than them going to 10% any time soon. It’s probably better to worry about reality than hypos that are far off into the future. Are you still not going to buy when rates are 3%? Others will which will cause prices to go up again.

You may be right. They may not raise rates, there may never be significant inflation. However, I doubt it on both counts.

Let's say there was inflation that doubled the value of your house that you bought yesterday for that same $600k. So now it is worth 1.2m. Let's also assume that the cost of everything else has gone up exactly 100%. However inflation is still rising so the fed decides it needs to over-react (which it always does) and raises interest rates to 10%.

If we use the original numbers from my post and simply double them, a buyer for your home would need to pay $740,000 to get that same (inflation adjusted) $3200 payment. Congratulations, you made $140,000 on the sale of your home, which would be worth (inflation adjusted) $70,000. Conversely, you could hang on to your house and keep making the monthly payments and hope that your ability to continue to make those payments would continue (no layoffs, etc - since that type of thing NEVER happens.) Of course, in the amazingly unlikely case that it were to happen and you could not make your mortgage payments, you'd have the pleasure of a short sale and whatever joy will come along with that.

My strategy would be to wait for much higher interest rates that push down prices, then buy and refinance to a much lower payment in the future. Rising interest rates OR loss of value to the dollar is inevitable simply because interest rates are only low because the "Federal" Reserve keeps printing dollars to buy Treasuries. Without this false demand, interest rates would be higher.

The US government has only a couple ways to deal with the MASSIVE debt that has been created over the years.

1. Try to generate more tax revenue. Numerous studies and real world scenarios have shown that raising taxes as much as would be necessary would massively retard growth, and result in smaller overall tax receipts. Heck Obama's own cabinet member Christina Romer published a paper stating exactly that. Not a solution, just another failure.

2. Default on the debt. This seems very unlikely since the repercussions to the ruling class politicians would be massive and they'd be without jobs or anyone to steal money from.

3. Inflate the debt away. This solution actually harms the fewest people, only those with cash and no income. Inflation would cause much higher tax receipts without the pain to those paying taxes. This becomes the top choice solution.

If there is another remedy, I'd love to hear it.

Finally as it pertains to Bernanke, unlike Greenspan, I think he will be "found out" quite soon. A much larger number of people are aware of the nature of central banking, fiat currencies and all of the manipulation being done by the world's largest banks. Consequently, I don't think Bernanke will be around more than another 5 years, on the high side. Of course it is likely that the currency crisis will be along before then anyhow.

robertoaribas says

Ok, lets dispel economic nonsense on here:

The US government can deflate its debt away? NO, for several reasons.

1. ANY sign of sustained inflation, and interest rates are going to fly up. The US govt is the biggest borrower on the planet, and substantial amounts are shorter term debts. They have to be rolled over, some 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, etc. If borrowing rates go up, interest alone would quickly exceed the governments ability to borrow more, leading to a currency crisis. This may happen regardless, but pushing for inflation causes it sooner. Repudiation of debt, and a balanced budget with a depression would follow.

2. MOST of the government obligations increase with inflation. Social Security, medicare, the cost of education, the list goes on and on. So in many ways, inflation will not really help the US out as much as many on here think. The government, in addition to fixed rate debt has substantial and huge unfunded future liabilities, all of which would grow with inflation.

3. Inflation, once out of the bag, is very very hard to control. There is a reason we had 18% interest rates with high unemployment, it was the only way to stop the last inflationary spiral, a future one would be worse.

First off, I didn't not suggest the government would deflate away it's debt, quite the opposite. Read your first sentence. Also, you might consider a less inflammatory way to open your commentary, after all it is a bit insulting.

You're right, if interest rates rise the cost to borrow for everyone will go up including the government. This would become an issue for them on all maturing debt. However, with more sizable tax receipts, the debts could be paid off as necessary. Yes, it is likely that they'd need to balance the budget. However, as I have pointed out, they'd certainly be very slow to change the tax code, meaning that everyone would be paying much more in taxes as a percentage of earnings. This would obviously help to balance the budget and pay down debt.

To your second point, that is true, in theory. If you're not currently aware of it, the government manipulates the numbers something fierce and flat out lies on most government data. Have a look at Jeff Neilsen and Karl Denninger's work over on Seeking Alpha for good information.

To your third point, our current crop of politicians is arrogant enough to think they could control the economy and inflation well enough.

Again I ask, what do you think the solution is? How would you deal with the MASSIVE debt this country has taken on?

robertoaribas says

My plan?

1. no more idiotic stimulus, such as home buyer credits, only targeted infrastructure stimulus, such as energy policy.

2. roll back bush tax credit on the rich.

3. REAL healthcare reform, including tort law reform

4. Revise social security, through raised caps on the income contribution, and caps on payout, so it actually actuarially balances.

5. eliminate mortgage interest deduction, which helps the rich more than the middle class anyways.

6. get out of foreign wars, pull back substantial foreign troops. (who are we going to fight in europe?, Japan?)

7. freeze most govt programs, get rid of bunches of them, scale the mission and scope of others down [dept of agriculture would be a good place to start, but plenty of others are quite wasteful too]

8. Reasonable immigration program. [more people = more taxes]

9. Time, the bias of the US economy is growth, so if the budget can be balanced, over time it becomes a lower percentage of the gdp, and hence more manageable.

To your points:

1. 100% agreed.

2. Those tax credits (voted for by Congress - not fair to blame it on Bush, but hey, that's the liberal way.) benefited every income group. I would also consider letting them expire though.

3. I agree on tort reform, however you'd need to be a lot more specific about both plans.

4. Social security is a tough one. It is supposed to be a benefit program that you have invested into. It has become a tax entitlement. You are supposed to get back the money you put in no matter what you are worth or how much money you make. Frankly it is unfair to take by force your money then tell you that you can't have it later because you were more responsible than others.

5. 100% agree on mortgage deduction elimination.

6. While I agree, I do wonder why we are there. It is silly to think we could possibly know everything the president knows, consequently it makes second guessing them a little unreasonable. I agree it would be wise to withdraw troops from other countries though.

7. 100% agreed, cut back on social programs too.

8. I agree. What would be a reasonable would be to remove all the illegals, but then I just happen to believe in following the laws.

thunderlips11 says

Eliminate H1-Bs unless a company can PROVE there are no qualified applicants at any price, not just the price they want to pa

Of course they can prove there are no qualified US applicants. Just read the ads looking for engineers with a masters, five years experience, fluent in Cantonese, starting salary $32,000. H1b is a joke and always has been. The only shortage of US tech workers is 25 year olds willing to work 110 hours a week under any conditions because if they lose their job they get shipped back to India. H1b visas belong to the employer, not the employee, so the employer can demand anything with absolutely no recourse for the worker. It's a system that virtually guarantees abuse.

The quality and quantity of good IT (American) people is pretty low - I don't buy this. And they all expect to start with no experience making $60k, three weeks vacation, free tech toys, unfettered access to facebook, and as soon as they get any semblance experience they jump ship and take any and all investment in training with them. And these are the ones that couldn't hack it with a decent BS degree and ended up with a general studies or some other non-related degree...or simply college dropouts. Asking them to do some REALLY basic math or statistics and they have to go home and read their little brother's algebra book. If there are really 250,000 science and math grads a year, they must all be here on student visas.

The foreign workers generally have at least a masters and are willing to learn and aren't so enamored with the latest and greatest "cool stuff" that they'll work on less glamorous things that actually make businesses work. Of course this is all anecdotal but someone who's been in the field for close to 20 years that's what I've seen...I can only imagine it is the same in other tech industries. I was actually quite happy after the dotcom bomb as most of these people went back to doing something they were qualified for...like waiting tables and selling mortgages...

bob2356 says

The only shortage of US tech workers is 25 year olds willing to work 110 hours a week under any conditions because if they lose their job they get shipped back to India.

Long hours are pretty standard game in the big 4 accounting firms who audit the local tech companies. You pretty much clock in at 9 or earlier at the clients site and clock out after 8pm.
After two-three weeks you pretty much rotate to the other client with same hours, and so on. You dont see any with H1B workers because they dont teach US Gaap in India, and you have to have a US University education and get licensed by the state your in. Big 4 and smaller firms are not complaining about lack of supply.

R&D has many issues, the "lack of qualifed US applicants" is just a lie created to cover their other motives. I been here for 30 years in high tech and we never had shortages of Engineers which justify looking outside the US.

EightBall says

Asking them to do some REALLY basic math or statistics and they have to go home and read their little brother’s algebra book. If there are really 250,000 science and math grads a year, they must all be here on student visas.

If my CFO asked to look up a FASB prouncement 20-30 years old, I too would have to go back do some research on the topic. Even simple FASBs regarding leases I would refer back to my text books.

EightBall says

The foreign workers generally have at least a masters and are willing to learn and aren’t so enamored with the latest and greatest “cool stuff” that they’ll work on less glamorous things that actually make businesses work

Many who started out in SV back in the 80s didnt have any degrees at all, and the stuff wasnt covered in any course you could take until many years later. As such they were pionners in their field. Many foreign degrees are worthless.

thunderlips11 says

American Employers don’t train. They expect you to come to the table, trained. And if another US company hires them, then I suppose they were a good value, no?

Oh yes they do. HP, Intel, IBM (when they were in the valley), as do old line industries like GE have job rotation programs made to get their employees trained in many aspects of their business. Training is one of the pillars of managment skills. If you cant train, there is no sense in calling yourself a manager.

thunderlips11 says

The main problem with American Companies is they want to pay overseas wages to their employees, while demanding American prices for their products and services. Something is going has to give eventually.

Like the auto industry, foreign competitors labor force in tech companies is cheaper than domestic workers. We seen too many times foreign competitors dropping their prices on US markets, so there isnt any pricing power we can exercise.

I'm an ex-pat Canadian (now an American citizen) and a physicist and I'd like to offer my point of view on the hiring of foreign workers. There are several reasons why American companies hire foreigners:

1. A true lack of domestic talent. Back in the day, engineering was a well-paying, stable career, with plenty of opportunities so many people went to engineering school. Then, as manufacturing declined and financial services boomed, getting an MBA became the ticket to a high-paying job. In the nineties, even physicists were being hired by Wall Street to create derivatives and other complex financial products. So, with a lack of home-grown talent, companies started looking elsewhere where technical degrees are still desirable.

2. Attitude. The current generation of American youth has a strong sense of entitlement that just doesn't match the realities of the current workplace. New graduates feel they deserve high salaries and either price themselves out of the market or turn down entry-level jobs. A foreigner who's standard of living is much lower sees an opportunity to make a better life for themselves and is willing to work much harder for less money.

3. Capitalism. In a global economy, companies maximize their profits by reducing their costs. Just as manufacturing goes offshore when it's cheaper, foreign workers who are willing to come to the States and work for less are another form of competition Americans face.

Just my thoughts.

Not to keep going further off topic on a real estate crash website...

My point is that...
1) I disagree that there are enough tech workers being "produced" in America by our education system (what do we rank in math and science globally?) and

2) There ARE high quality foreign individuals out there and I don't think they are the problem (see #1). Yes there is a lot of trash out there (both foreign and domestic) but that is mainly due to problem #1 (Why would there be so many low-quality workers with jobs if there were enough quality workers available?). If 250,000 graduates in math and science were enough to fill the positions then there wouldn't be the need for the foreign workers.

EightBall says

If 250,000 graduates in math and science were enough to fill the positions then there wouldn’t be the need for the foreign workers.

Because it's cheaper to hire the foreign workers.

thunderlips11 says

The difference is that German companies are better managed, and German national policy penalizes outsourcing, rewards investment in people and technology, and punishes simple arbitrage. MOST IMPORTANTLY, Germany subsidizes education to the point where somebody actually has a skill. US Education System is “College or Bust” and is heavily tilted against trade schools.

There is actually a simple reason for this. In the 1980's when Bill Bennett was head of the DOE under Reagan he was totally committed to having all federal education funds go to public colleges and universities. After a long, bitter, and very dirty political battle that is almost what happened. He lacked the clout to exclude public junior colleges from federal funding (but tried very hard anyway) but did get every trade school kicked out. Why bother? Because the public universities budgets were exploding (still are) and they wanted to monopolize the public funding. Any funding to trade schools was considered funding that universities would lose. So now you have "colleges" teaching things like welding, air conditioning, and auto repair. Perfect.

thunderlips11 says

Computer Analyst or Programmer or anything IT was nowhere to be found on the top 30. Even if the combined total was north of 1M (out of only approx 90M workers), that still means we have too many STEM grads for the amount of jobs available.

Did you include other engineering jobs? Programming is a small portion of STEM employment...

bob2356 says

MOST IMPORTANTLY, Germany subsidizes education to the point where somebody actually has a skill. US Education System is “College or Bust” and is heavily tilted against trade schools.

I definitely agree with this. I studied in Germany for two years, and it seems their three-tier education system works well for them. It's just not expected that everyone go to college, and they have very good apprenticeship programs in all the trades. You can make good money and live well as a tradesman there. And people are proud of their trade, and generally do very high quality work, helping the whole economy.

I-man says

So, with a lack of home-grown talent, companies started looking elsewhere where technical degrees are still desirable.

BS! there is plenty of engineers in the US for several decades now. Ask a hiring manager why they are not hirining. Its gets down to age. The age discrimination lawsuit against Google is a prime example of the mentality in Silicon Valley. For some the best and brightest are too old to be hired. You have kids with little experience being promoted over more senior and talented older people. We didnt have this back in the 80s and 90s. Some people created the myth SV is about younger employees and many wrongly followed this dreadfull self destructive path. Now you have Sr Managers who panic at the thought of going IPO, M&A and other growth programs because they have no experience actually doing the work. That is one of the reason you dont see many IPOs these days.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%e2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%e2%80%99s-all-about-age/

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.

I don't know where you get your stats - but everything I read has the US in the middle of the road (or less than average)... http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008016.pdf

That is one of many you can find out there - but I haven't seen any that puts the US near the top.

There is a somewhat religious debate as to whether there are shortages in tech workers (hence the high number of visas) or not. I'm really not interested in arguing one way or the other in that debate ... I'm sure there are legitimate arguments on both sides (shortage is causing the increase in foreign workers or the foreign works are squeezing out the locals) ... Being in IT, however, I have noticed the numbers (at the college/university level) of computer science graduates in decline based on published reports and have followed this over the years. I haven't paid that much attention to engineering and other tech fields - they may be better. Even Bill Gates often laments the dearth of American software developers available...I still remember when I graduated from college and 100% of the comp sci students had job offers (there were only 20 of us so it was easy to determine this...) and the rest of the dolts had "Give me a job" written on their hats at the graduation ceremony.

There are always foreign workers that will work for less ...I'm sure they were arguing that when my grandfather got off the boat from Italy in the early 20th century... but any decent company/person knows (or should know) that if you get a bunch of $2 baseball players you'll be watching a lot of $2 baseball.

I lived in Volkach, Germany for 3 years. While I agreed whole heartedly that Germany stresses education and investment in vocational skills, I have to mention a downside: their system is set up to make determinations very early on in a child's life (I recall 5th grade primer level) as to whether that child will be put on a path toward college or whether they are channeled into a vocational training path. From what locals / neighbors told me, there is not a lot of opportunity to switch gears once you are headed down your path. Granted, I didn't take a broad poll but I did repeatedly hear this from those we encountered over our 3 yr stay.

I-man says

3. Capitalism. In a global economy, companies maximize their profits by reducing their costs. Just as manufacturing goes offshore when it’s cheaper, foreign workers who are willing to come to the States and work for less are another form of competition Americans face.

The move to other cheaper US states and than oveseas was the logical reaction to foreign competition moving into the US markets. Walk in to a Frys and look who the mfg are for components, semi and storage devices. Over half are non-usa mfg. Back in the 80s, when SV had near 100% market share, companies had no problem selling their products to corproate clients at high prices. Our plants were working 24/7 and times were good. Once the Japanese entered the markets and cut their prices, in some cases well below their own production costs to gain US market shares, US companies suffered very deep losses in revenues. They reacted by reducing their cost structure including labor. Many who didnt, never survived. Since then its been a price war with one cutting prices against the other and costs following profit margins. 2-3 years ago the Korean mfg of flash chips was busted for dumping below costs, but the remedy was too late and chip prices kept falling.

thunderlips11 says

Yeah, TW, this UCal Davis Comp Sci Prof says Age Discrimination is more a factor in H1-B preference than anything.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

The use of foreign workers for cheap labor pervades the entire tech industry, INCLUDING the large, mainstream firms, and INCLUDING the foreign workers hired from U.S. universities. and INCLUDING the major mainstream U.S. firms. It is NOT limited to the "bodyshops."

Shortage arguments based on comparison of American K-12 math/science scores to those of other nations are red herrings, based on misleading averages. It is also rank hypocrisy, since the same employers who claim that "Johnnie can't do math" are laying off tens of thousands of Americans who had been top math/science students when they were kids.

I agree that our ed system is heavily tilted toward getting people into college. I dont know if its a conspiracy of the gov/ed lobby to get people to spend huge amounts on expensive college degrees.. more likely its that we do not manufacture anything anymore and hence dont need as many tradespeople. Everything seems to go in cycles - during and after WWII we needed lots of trades to build all of the stuff for domestic and foreign consumption (wars); Japan was king in the 70s and 80s and we stopped building stuff here; tech boom in 90s and into early 2000 and everyone wanted a degree in Comp Science; financial services have been in vogue since the 70s and especially in the 80s thru late 2000s; now what? If you were advising a young person about whether to go to college and what to major in, what would you tell them?

I have to mention a downside: their system is set up to make determinations very early on in a child’s life (I recall 5th grade primer level) as to whether that child will be put on a path toward college or whether they are channeled into a vocational training path.
I just read about this in the Economist, as they are having a hard time reforming the system (lots of push back from the middle class).

thunderlips11 says

It’s like saying “The Best Race Car drivers come from Kazakstan, where most people ride mules, most of the time, and very few own a car or have even driven one. Italy and the American South, don’t really have the best racers.”

almost peed my britches. excellant way to allow me to follow the convo. thanks.

Bap33 says

thunderlips11 says
It’s like saying “The Best Race Car drivers come from Kazakstan, where most people ride mules, most of the time, and very few own a car or have even driven one. Italy and the American South, don’t really have the best racers.”
almost peed my britches. excellant way to allow me to follow the convo. thanks.

Write the script and sell it to Hollywood Baby! Something like Happy Gilmore story line.